Integrated circuits, or ICs, are created by patterning a substrate and materials deposited on the substrate. The substrate is typically a semiconductor wafer. The patterned features make up devices and interconnections. This process generally starts with a designer creating an integrated circuit by hierarchically defining functional components of the circuit using a hardware description language. From this high-level functional description, a physical circuit implementation dataset is created, which is usually in the form of a netlist. This netlist identifies logic cell instances from a cell library, and describes cell-to-cell connectivity.
Many phases of these electronic design activities may be performed with computer aided design (CAD) tools or electronic design automation (EDA) systems. For example, an integrated circuit designer may use a set of layout EDA application programs, such as a layout editor, to create a physical integrated circuit design layout from a logical circuit design. The layout EDA application uses geometric shapes of different materials to create the various electrical components on an integrated circuit and to represent electronic and circuit IC components as geometric objects with varying shapes and sizes. After an integrated circuit designer has created an initial integrated circuit layout, the integrated circuit designer then verifies and optimizes the integrated circuit layout using a set of EDA testing and analysis tools. Verification may include, for example, design rule checking to verify compliance with rules established for various IC parameters. The EDA layout editing tools are often performed interactively so that the designer can review and provide careful control over the details of the electronic design.
Standardized power formats have been used in purely digital designs, analog/mixed-signal (AMS) design, and digital/mixed-signal designs to describe power intent, power management data, power-specific data, or other data generally related to power (collectively “power data” hereinafter) at various stages of the electronic design automation (EDA) of these designs. These standardized power formats such as CPF (Common Power Format from Si2 or Silicon Integration Initiative) or UPF (Unified Power Format from IEEE or Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) are directed at specifying power data for the design or specifying power intent and implementation of the design just once such that various EDA design tools may consistently use the power data to automatically insert power control features or to check that the result matches the power intent during the design process. General details about some exemplary standardized power formats may be found in “Si2 Common Power Format Specification”, Ver. 2.0, Silicon Integration Initiative, Inc., Feb. 14, 2011 and IEEE Std “1801-2009—IEEE Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits”, IEEE Mar. 27, 2009, the content of both documents is hereby explicitly incorporated by reference for all purposes.
One of the limitations of these standardized power formats is that only logic signals or expressions are considered legal such that all controlling or controlled signals need to be logic in order to be recognized and utilized in these standardized power formats. Nonetheless, the controlling or controlled signals in, for example, purely analog design, analog/mixed-signal designs, and digital/mixed-signal designs (collectively mixed-signal design or mixed-signal designs) are not necessarily logic and thus present a challenge in leveraging these standardized power formats during the design process because these standardized power formats do not recognize and hence cannot process non-logic signals or expressions.
Thus, there exists a need for a method, a system, and an article of manufacture for Implementing mixed-signal electronic circuit designs with power data in standardized power formats.